


Agastopia

by Maja_the_Dragon



Category: Deathless - Catherynne M. Valente
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-29
Updated: 2018-01-31
Packaged: 2019-03-11 04:08:36
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13516284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Maja_the_Dragon/pseuds/Maja_the_Dragon
Summary: Agastopia is a secret, hidden kingdom in a secret, hidden country no one knows about. It's ruled by a merciless soon-to-be queen with a half shaved head and metal all in her face. To claim her throne, Ursula must complete several tasks to create a specific sword and slay the fierce dragon who lives in a mountain beyond the Forever Night. Not only does she have to beat the monster but, she must also rescue a man she has never met who is supposed to become her husband.





	1. A Secret, Hidden Kingdom in a Secret, Hidden Country

**Author's Note:**

> This is just a project of a university student who has taken a semester off. It isn't anything special at all, please don't get too excited about it. It's mostly a place for dreamy ravings~

Agastopia is not a kingdom easily found. 

It exists between blinks, in the uncomfortable space.

You have to want to be there but that requires you to know about it, which you don’t. No one does except the people and creatures who already live there. 

But sometimes you have a dream about a strange land. Where the sky is deep blue with sparse cotton candy clouds and the fields are endlessly golden and at the center is a castle made from glass because no one in Agastopia ever lies or they’ll be thrown into the Forever Night.

Still, you won’t ever go there for real, and even in your wildest dreams you won’t be able to put a name to this mystical place. You’ll wake up in your bed and think to yourself about how funny the entire thing was. You will feel silly thinking about small men with beards and pointed red caps, imps with skin molting while they sing showtunes. Soon you’ll forget about the cold, cruel mountains jutting up like teeth on the horizon like they want to eat you and the icy lip of the lake where ugly lobsters crawl in the frozen mud. All this ruled over by a queen you can’t quite picture, but you know she is taller than anyone you’ve ever met.. 

She is fierce with eyes like a hungry wolf and shoulders like bird bones. You can’t remember much else, except you want to be like her. Her name is lost on you like the name of the kingdom where she sits on her clockwork throne. Somehow her crooked mouth lives in your waking hours and you carry the idea of her around in your pocket for a couple of days. When you look in the mirror you think about how she would look, if you were her, that is, but you aren’t. You will never be part of the greater, outer world of your dreams, and slowly it will all fade from your mind. Blown away like dust or sand, they are the same thing anyway.

For a while you’ll be lonesome for the rivers, for the woods. For gangly young boys on collars who have teeth and claws. Something inside you will long for hoards of golden coins, the weight of a sword. You’ll want nothing more than to meet a dragon with glowing orange eyes, who has pale thin hands and bright white teeth. You won’t know why because you won’t remember your dream about Agastopia but it will remember you. It will tug at your heart until you feel so sad you want to die or cry, they are the same thing anyway.

Everyone has this dream once, and only once. 

Once is enough to drive anyone mad with lust for the place they can never have. For the secret, hidden kingdom in a secret, hidden country no one knows about. This is the dream, you see, this is your mind spilled out like rainwater.


	2. The Sisterhood, The Parliament of Witches, or Ursula's babysitters

Ursula sat on her clockwork throne and spun the gears wildly. Her long fingers were quick, they erased seconds and minutes and hours from the life of a hare crouched in the weeds somewhere in the village square. She was quite sure the hare could feel its life grow and shrink, like an inhale and exhale, which was enough to cause any poor creature distress. For Ursula it was absent minded entertainment, she hardly realized she was doing it until the great iron doors of the throne room were flung open and she accidentally spun the gears too fast. The hare died six months ago.

“Bless,” she said to herself. It was so easy to kill things by accident, too easy. Especially when she wasn’t paying attention.

From the open doors, three old women bustled in. They were sallow and wrinkled and their hair fell in thick, oily strands out from under their pointed caps. Each one had on a robe tied with a silver chain about her thick waist. These were the Sisterhood, the Parliament of Witches, or better yet, Ursula’s babysitters. 

“Hail, little Ursula,” they said. Each Sister knelt down at the foot of the throne, where their knees touched the glass it whined and fogged. Death and rot followed the Sisters wherever they went, so did the sound of machinery and nails and great bogs of smoke. 

“What do you want this time?” Ursula said.  
“Oh, it is near the full moon and you know what that means,” the Sister on the right said and her great lips parted to reveal rows of razor sharp teeth.  
“It is almost time for your coronation,” said the Sister on the left and her ears puffed sickly green clouds of petrol smoke.  
“Yes, your Majesty, little princess, it is almost time,” said the Sister in the center and she tilted her head on her copper pipe neck with such calculation Ursula sat back on her throne.

“Do you think I’m stupid, Sisters? I know what’s coming for me,” Ursula said. Her hands clasped the sleek arms of her throne and beneath her the gears whirred and spat and each life in Agastopia shuddered. Ursula knew it was time for her coronation, which in turn meant the Three Tasks before the One Task before she could be queen.

The Sisters swayed together, metal scratching the glass floor, their mouths open. Thick, black oil spilled down their chins. “The Three and then the One,” they said.

Ursula stood up, her combat boots squeaked against the glass. Her fingers flew up to her face and their tips traced the metal studs at her mouth, her nose, her eyebrow. It was a comfort to touch them when she felt anxiety creep up her spine like a monkey. “Do you doubt me, Sisters? You have raised me, since my parents were lost in the Groaning Oceans along with my seventy brothers and sisters. I’m alone, the last. You know me.”

The witches hissed at the mention of the Royal Family because they themselves were a plague, one that rooted itself deep in Agastopia the night someone had a very bad dream. They came from the dream in their robes, with their old faces, and their oily hair. No one quite remembers how but they soon got jobs in the kingdom and then became the Royal Advisors. The Sisterhood, the Parliament of Witches, Ursula’s babysitters. 

No one knows who had this bad dream, but only that it killed them. The Sisters escaped through a hole in their skull and seeped out into Agastopia like ichor. They came from some other place entirely and Ursula hated them, except she could not be rid of them because of the law. The law set down by her mother, who said the Sisterhood were to take the throne of Agastopia if the Royal Family were to be extinguished. Then they all died, except for Ursula, who hated the ocean and hid in the cellar pantry with her knees folded against her chest.

They left without their youngest daughter and she survived where her family did not, swallowed up by the Groaning Ocean in the east. How could such a kingdom ever exist? Ursula didn’t know or care, except for the fact she would soon become its queen. 

“We do not doubt you, our great Ursula,” they said. “We doubt your memory of the Three and the One.It has been so long since the articles have been read.”

“Then let them be read again,” Ursula said and her jaw twinged.

Not even a second after she spoke, another figure came through the open door. A small, hunched thing with a tortoise shell for a back. A great pinched mouth, half-moon spectacles. In his naked arms thick parchment tied with crimson ribbon. He was an ancient, dusky creature Ursula knew from her childhood when he read the Books at her family’s mock burning. She could not remember his name.

He came up to the throne and opened one of his parchments, which rolled behind him and out of the door. “Hail, Ursula,” he said. Dust spilled from his mouth, ink from his eyes. “It is written in the Book, that on the day of her coronation service, the princess must have completed the Three and the One.”

The Sisters creaked and croaked.

“The Three are tasks to collect the material in order to create the Sword, the One is to slay the dragon in the mountains beyond the Forever Night. The princess must complete the Three and the One before she can become queen.” The little turtle-like man coughed up a moth, which fluttered around the head of the Sister on the left and died in a lick from her toxic fumes. “Also, when the princess comes to the cave of the dragon, it is written, she will rescue a young male prisoner. A weak, feeble youth who has been snatched as a prize for the great beast and the princess will marry the prisoner after the One has been completed. Their wedding night will be inside the fiery lungs of the dragon.”

Ursula snarled, she hated the word marriage. It bit and snapped at her. Hit across her cheek like a piece of fresh leather. Why did everyone want her to marry? Why was every story, every poem and song and conversation about true love? It made her sick, made her want to pull her teeth out by the roots. 

“The queen and king will rule Agastopia,” said the turtle. It was enough to make Ursula growl and bang her fist against her throne, which knocked into a gear and took ten years off the life of the baker. Poor fool, he spent his entire life baking bread and pastries for children who didn’t care a thing about strawberry balsamic reductions. “Together they will live happily ever after,” and this time Ursula mouthed the words along with him.

“No one wants a happy ending anymore,” Ursula said and looked down through the floor to the kitchens below. It was like looking through a clear pool of water, the scene rippled, men and mice ran in circles with food between their paws. 

“You do,” said the middle Sister. “You must!”  
“I want an end,” Ursula said.  
“Ah, but where you are still queen? Queen of all Agastopia, like your mother and her mother and her mother’s mother before her. Queen over the land, the sea, the sky, the mountains.”  
“Of course, kneeling nag. Of course I want to be queen.” Ursula stared down at the Sisters, her dark eyes hard and hawkish and mean.   
“The Three and the One,” the Sisters said.  
“It isn’t the Three or the One that bothers me,” Ursula flopped down onto her throne and sighed heavily. Her shoulders ached with the weight of it all.

“Marriage is the solidifier,” the turtle, the Book reader, said. She’d almost forgotten him in the hiss and spit of words, his sleepy eyes turned up to look at her pale face. What must she look like to someone like him? This glorified rose with all her thorns. Ursula flicked her hand at them, the lot of them.

“That’s enough for one day,” she said. The Sisters rose from the ground and the room coughed with their scent. Like rotten meat or greasy fish. They all bowed low and backed away. 

“Whatever your Majesty wishes, we are here to serve. Serve the queen,” they said. The turtle man began to roll up his great parchment, his mouth caught in a great yawn when Ursula spun a gear with her heel on the side panel of her throne. The Sisters and the turtle all backed away and out of the room is slow motion and the doors slammed shut after them. Ursula sunk deep into her throne, her gloved hands covering her face.

It was only three days until the full moon. Three days until the Three and the One were to be completed for her coronation, and then what? Ursula would be married in the lungs of a dragon to a man she did not know or love or could not love whatsoever. She would become queen of everything and everyone in Agastopia, but she would lose a sense of freedom she didn’t know she had. Shackled to this throne where before she chose to sit in its familiar hand.

Soon the throne and the strange, feeble man would be her master. They would tell her when to rise and fall and she would hate them both. Ursula could feel it in her wolfish heart. 

“How can this be happening,” she said in the quiet of the throne room. Around her the castle moved and lived, she could see it through the great glass walls. Each room was clear to her and every subject under her domain. They could not lie, they could not hide. They were all naked before her hard eyes, but did it mean the same for her? 

Ursula stood and walked away from her throne. Her great leather apron made hard sounds, uneasy sounds. She needed to clear her head from all this talk of tasks and dragons and husbands. Such stupid talk, she thought. Ursula passed through the great doors, the solid iron doors like shields from prying eyes, and into the long corridor. She would go to the great stables on the outside of her castle, away from her throne, and visit her dear, old friend.


	3. A Dear, Old Friend

Out in the dark the stables hung like a cloud. Even from this distance, she could hear the low thump of a bass guitar. It drew her feet down the thin, pale road away from the castle of glass and the rules and the Book. Brought her into the warmth and the thick, wooden walls of the stables where the sound of the bass swelled up beneath her feet. Pushed up at her heels. Here, she felt real, not so thin and transparent. She could touch the rough, chewed doors and smell fresh manure and the musk of horses with sweat crusted on their chests. 

Horses peeked at her from their shadowy stalls. Their big, dark eyes wet as they watched her walk steadily down the narrow aisle. The barn was dark, except for a very thin light at the end of the corridor where it split off into a large feed room. Ursula could taste the strings of an electric guitar on her tongue, the whine of a violin in her ears, the deep throated laugh of a cello licked at her arms. 

It did not surprise her, what she found in the feed room. It never surprised her, even when she was a little girl and stumbled on them. Those chalk faced kids whose fingers bled. There were always five of them, and Ursula loved them so much she kept their gears slow so they never aged like everyone else in Agastopia. They stayed young and stupid forever, for her entertainment and pleasure because even now she was older than them. Sometimes she wondered if they cared about being frozen in time, in flux with the rest of the world to play their night music in the barns where the horses tried to sleep but couldn’t.

Urula smiled at the idea of them.

She was jealous of them, she always had been. They were free to play their wicked, crying music each night in the feed room. In-between the bags and barrels and old sweet copper bits. With their bandaged hands and long hair and ripped clothes. No one told them to straighten their curved spines, no one told them they must complete the Three and then the One to become queen. 

They never acknowledge her, they kept spinning out their music like a cheap spiderweb, and Ursula walked past them, through them, to the back door. Out into the silvery night where her dear, old friend must be soaking up the moonlight.

“You must have your dancing shoes on,” Ursula said and came to lean against the thick boards of the paddock. The stallion did not acknowledge her, he pranced from one corner to the next and wherever his hooves touched the ground, it glowed pale green. Moonbeans caught in the long strands of his mane when he tossed his elegant, thin head up towards the sky.

The sound of his snort rolled like thunder, lodged inside her chest right beneath her heart, or where her heart would be if she had one. Did she have one? Ursula’s hand went to cover the space and she could sense a steady, easy thump beneath her bones. 

With a quiet huff, the stallion turned to face her. His body shimmered like ice and great clouds of frost came from his velvet nostrils. 

“I don’t dance,” he said and leapt in the opposite direction. Threw his back feet into the chilly night, slinging mud and grass in clumps. Ursula grinned even though he couldn’t see her, and she climbed over the fence into the paddock to watch him not dance. It was the most beautiful not dance she had ever seen and it moved something inside her, like a dam ready to burst with the press of ancient waters from lonely steams all collected into one place.

Ursula stood in the middle of the small paddock and watched the silvery horse run. “You are the best not dancer I have ever seen, Kash.” 

“This is what mourning looks like, old girl,” Kash said. “I mourn still for the brothers I lost on the ship”

Ursula spun in slow, lazy circles to watch the stallion cry. His head was needle-like, sharp and angular. He kept his ears up, forward. Did he always run when he was sad? Did he mourn every night like Ursula for what they both lost to the sea? Maybe it was what brought them close over the years, they had both lost so much on that terrible death ship. 

It was not a dance, after all. It was a silent weeping and she could hear it when she closed her eyes against the look of him in the moon. The sluggish pull of his heart and his lungs, the groaning bones in his long legs. His entire body mourned. Kash was the last, like her, they were both orphans together. “Come here, my friend,” Ursula said and opened up her bird like arms to him. Kash twisted around, the curve of his neck sparkled and the light shot up into the sky where it blossomed peach and tangerine.

Kash came to her, pressed his mouth against her shoulder. His saliva soaked down to her skin and she could feel the bony prints of his yellow teeth. “I will mourn with you,” Ursula said and raked her palm down his neck. “I miss them, too, your brothers and my brothers and sisters.”

“No,” Kash said, “you mourn for something else. I can feel it in your hands, hear it in your words. Like bitter poison, like a new idea.”

Ursula swallowed hard and brought her hand up to her mouth. She stroked the metal studs at each corner. The stallion hung his head over her shoulder, warmth blossomed over her entire body. 

“It’s nothing, Kash,” Ursula said.  
“Bother and nothing, it’s always something with you.”  
“Really this time,” Ursula said but she knew Kash would never believe her. Without prompt, he bit her shoulder and she smacked his in return with a quiet squeak. “What was that for, you old nag?”  
“For lying,” Kash turned away from her and his tail swatted at his sides. “Just because you aren’t in the glass castle, doesn’t mean you can lie. No one lies in Agastopia.”  
“I do. All the time, even to myself.”  
“Then you are a fool and no one believes you. Not even yourself,” Kash half reared and started to run again. 

Ursula held her breath and wrung her gloved hands together. He was right, he was always right even when he didn’t mean to be, but was she going to let him know that? Not for a second because a queen doesn’t take advice from anyone and she doesn’t listen to the ramblings of old horses who might turn into a puff of dust at any moment. 

Like a distant dream she could hear the soft hum of the cello, the only instrument left. All the others had quieted down ages ago, their sleepy teenaged players do doubt curled together like rats in the hayloft. Tomorrow would be a new day, but the cello played on. A soundtrack to Kash’s quiet mourning in the paddock. 

“The Three and then the One,” Ursula said and the silvery horse kept his pace. He did not slow or flinch or fear what she said because it meant nothing. Horses were like that. If it did not directly concern them, they cared very little about it. “Kash, my coronation begins in three days and I have to complete the Three and then the One to become queen.”

“I know,” the horse tucked his chin into his chest and he looked like a swan. He floated on nimble feet and feathers sprouted from his back in a mohawk. “Every little queen must do the Three and then the One.”

It sounded innocent in his mouth, like breathing or eating. Like something that happened everyday. Ursula felt small. 

“Oh, don’t be so bothered by it all, dear. We all have a part to play in this world, this shadow of life. Some are greater than others, and some are too small to recognize at all. But without even one piece of this puzzle, we would all fail, collectively,” Kash said. He spun around her like a moon until she felt dizzy. “I guess it’s different for you than it is for me. I was bred to serve and to carry the heaviness of you. But you, darling, were meant to carry the heaviness of us all.”

The cello died with one last whine and the only sound was Kash’s hooves. Ursula felt the heaviness he spoke about. It rested on her shoulders like a bird. “I wish my mother were here,” she said.

“What a selfish brat you are, Ursula. What a naive little babe. You want her here to take the heaviness from you, not because you miss her, like I miss my many brothers. Not like how I miss their shell-like ears and playful nips and the thunder of their hooves.” Kash stopped his circling and looked out beyond the paddock where the stars hung heavy in the sky. He could see clouds and mountains and trees and insects with tiny yellow spots. Agastopia crumbled and rebuilt itself in the skin of his lower eyelid. “When they passed into the sea, I was given the heaviness of you and because I am your horse, Ursula, I carry you in love.”

Ursula clenched her jaw and her hands at the same time. She did not want to talk about love or heaviness anymore. Kash tilted his face towards her, “you could use the gears of your great throne and go back to a time before this one. When your mother and father and seventy brothers and sisters were not eaten by the water.”

She didn’t move or make a sound. Ursula thought about the clockwork throne and the gears and how she could go back if she wanted to badly enough. She could save them or go with them or let it all happen again. It was in her power, much like anything else. But she couldn’t. 

“No I can’t,” Ursula said.  
“And why not? You sit on the clockwork throne.”  
“Because no matter how many times I go back, I will always end up here. Time is not fooled by me or anyone else, it knows the beginning and end of everything. You talked about a puzzle, well, time won’t let the pieces change, they have to fit where they are meant to fit. Don’t you understand, Kash? No matter what, I’ll always end up here.”

The horse bowed his head to the ground and wondered how many times she had tried. How many times they had spoken in quiet murmurs like this together, the same conversation and strings of words between them. He wondered but did not ask. You never ask a queen why she does the things she does, after all. 

Ursula stood with her shoulder hunched forward, her face half in shadow and moonlight and Kash thought he saw the devil run across her cheeks. But the stallion came to her anyway, pressed his forehead against her leather apron to sigh dreamily into her. He would give her anything she wanted, he would carry the heaviness of her forever if it meant she would smile for him like she used to when she was a girl. Kash knew those days were behind them, but he wondered even still if she visited them in secret. When the quiet crept in on her, did she go to her throne and spin the gears and run barefoot with him in the fields where the honeysuckle laughed when it blossomed?

He would never know such a silly thing and it pricked his old heart. Ursula put her arms around his head, she held him there against her, the last of her innocent days, and she thought about the Three and then the One.


End file.
